A conclave to test Pope Francis’s legacy

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Before he became Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a devotee of La Virgen Desatanudos — Mary the untier of knots, the virgin mother of Jesus as a solver of gnarly problems. He’d need the help. As the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, he inherited two millennia of convoluted history and controversy, ranging from geopolitics to theology, from accounting for the Vatican’s riches to addressing the rancid legacy of priestly child abuse, from separating being pious and being just, from preserving influence to projecting power. Francis unraveled a fair few knots following his elevation on March 13, 2013. Now that he’s died, the question is, did he unsnarl enough to ensure his legacy?

His public persona may have been the humble and patient father figure, but Francis spent his 12 years as pope reorganizing the Vatican bureaucracy — the Roman curia — with more than a touch of ruthlessness. It was the kind of steely, no-nonsense style he honed when, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had to clean up a banking scandal inherited from his predecessor. Indeed, much of his energy as pope was spent reforming what’s called the Vatican Bank (the Institute for Works of Religion), a source of seemingly endless scandal for decades. He may have had the power to excommunicate the recalcitrant believer, but his most feared weapon was having an obstreperous church department audited. In his final days, he was wrestling with a looming budgetary crisis: How to pay the pensions of retired priests and nuns.

In the same dozen years, he also packed the College of Cardinals — tasked with electing his successor — with his appointees. Of the 140 or so cardinal-electors, about 110 were elevated by Francis. Will they coalesce to choose a pope in Francis’ image?

What’s less remarked upon is his revamp of the curia’s administrative structure — the power centers of the Vatican. These are now divided into Dicasteries (from the Greek for law court) instead of the 500-year-old system of departments called Congregations. Those used to be fiefdoms headed by cardinals. Of Francis’s 16 dicasteries , one is run by a nun and another by a layman. The cardinals in charge, while not all appointed by Francis, are seen as loyalists. Unlike the feudal congregations, the dicasteries are supposed to be more cooperative and coordinated with each other in the task of promoting Francis’s agenda.

The test of these changes — some of which were only finalized three years ago — will come in the closed-door power brokering that goes on around the conclave, which will elect a new pope. The process was dramatized in the recent movie Conclave, which explores a fictional papal vote.

The jovial Francis became pope because the conservative and cerebral Benedict XVI resigned on Feb. 28, 2013. The ostensible reason: Benedict didn’t want his physical deterioration to paralyze the church the way John Paul II’s Parkinson’s disease did during the twilight of a papacy that lasted more than a quarter of a century. But Benedict lived on for nine more years, a de facto warden of his legacy. Francis’s reforms were constrained to some extent if only to maintain civility between reigning pope and emeritus predecessor — a plot echoed in another film, 2019’s The Two Popes.

Benedict became a rallying point for right-wing Catholics incensed at Francis and his reforms — which included outreach to gay Catholics, relaxing rules on priestly celibacy and allowing divorced and remarried believers to receive communion. Conservatives have heated feelings too about Francis practically outlawing the traditional mass in ecclesiastical Latin. Could these emotions come together at the conclave and produce a surprise outcome?

While cordial with Benedict in public, Francis pooh-poohed his conservative critics, calling them mere cliques and claques, more annoying than anything. He certainly dealt with some of them the way any absolute monarch might. He sidelined the conservative US Cardinal Raymond Burke, stripping him of his Vatican salary. He placed Benedict’s personal secretary, Cardinal Georg Ganswein, into a kind of bureaucratic limbo two years before the former pope’s death. (Only in mid-2024 did Ganswein get a new assignment, papal nuncio to the Baltic states). Both men are under 80 years old and thus eligible to cast votes in the conclave.

Will the Holy Spirit — theologically the prime mover in the conclave process — work in mysterious ways and produce an unexpected result? In my lifetime, every new pope has been a surprise choice except for Paul VI, who was a fixture in the curia through two papacies. It’s not impossible to conceive of the huge bloc of cardinals created by Francis splintering because it cannot coalesce around one candidate — and then an outlier candidate suddenly gathering momentum with each round of voting.

It’s unseemly for any cardinal to actively lobby to become pope himself. In 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the aging and sidelined Grand Inquisitor — combined gravitas, well-timed sermons and appearances at high points of the season to again become papabile (Italian for “Pope-able”). He was elected to succeed John Paul II as Benedict XVI. (There was an unsuccessful attempt at that conclave to block Ratzinger by putting Bergoglio forward, but the Argentine did not allow himself to become a candidate. It was another thread in the tangled web between these two popes).

In the coming conclave, it’s not impossible that Eurocentric conservatives and right-wing American prelates — who may have the sympathies of Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert who just visited the pontiff — might combine with Francis’ newly minted African Cardinals, who’ve pushed back against his attempts at conciliation with gay Catholics. Cardinals who feel they’ve been shunted out of power by the reforms may also use their vote for comeuppance. Through the years, Francis has also discovered that a few cardinals he named have been secretly whispering against him. The Vatican remains a nest of intrigue, despite all his untying of knots.

And then there’s the emotional, irrational lift of gilt and glory, the baroque architecture, the Renaissance art, the history stretching back to Jesus and Saint Peter. Francis chose to live in the humble Santa Marta guest house, not the apostolic palace. But the next pope may be seduced by that glitter again.

“How many divisions does the pope have?” Joseph Stalin once sneered about the might of the Vatican. But popes once commanded armies, ordered crusades and directly ruled huge tracts of the Italian peninsula. The existence of the Vatican as a sovereign state is rooted in the papal refusal to let go of worldly and territorial power. The Catholic Church is not simply a spiritual enterprise; John Paul II was instrumental in cracking the Soviet bloc by inspiring his native Poland to rebel. Cardinals in recent history have stirred popular uprisings to overthrow governments. There are nearly 1.4 billion Catholics in the world — almost double the population of the G7 — who might be galvanized by a leader with infectious charisma, someone who doesn’t have the patience to unravel problems but, like Alexander the Great, takes a sword to the Gordian knot to wrest its prophecy of conquest.